Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation

Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger’s Secret Resistance
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ever before (Heidegger n.d., IX, epigram; by willing that the Germans find their
essence, Heidegger is thinking with “love” for Germany—GA 66, 63). “The
future ones…belong to the hard stock that will rescue the Germans and bring
them back into the urgency of their essence” (GA 66, 61). But the way to this
essence is not through control and violence, and essence cannot be found in
blood and land (GA 66, 167). Heidegger rejects the notion of breeding a strong
human type; readiness for be-ing is not a question of breeding (GA 66, 42).
Racial calculation is a consequence of subjectivism, as are both nationalism
and socialism (GA 69, 44): whether the goal is to save a race or to protect individual
freedom, subjectivity and its drive for power are at work (GA 69, 154).
Heidegger proposes that any racial thinking will involve ranking some races
over others, on the basis of their achievements or expressions (GA 69, 70; see
Addendum 4). This racism is unacceptable—not because Heidegger is an egalitarian,
but because the racist perspective unhistorically reduces Dasein to a
substrate, an underlying thing whose power is manifested in its thoughts and
acts. “Peoples and races” are not understood in terms of their relation to being
when they are interpreted as “units of life” (GA 66, 282).
The most dramatic political passage in all these writings may
be §47 of Besinnung, which begins with a sentence from a speech delivered by
Hitler on 30 January 1939: “There is no attitude that cannot find its ultimate
justification in the utility it provides for the [national] whole.” Heidegger proceeds
to attack every concept in this sentence, not in order to impose his own
ideology but in order to restore a measure of questioning to a political standpoint
that has hardened into a worldview. “Who is the whole? …What is its
goal? …Who determines the utility? …What does attitude mean?” (GA 66,
122). Heidegger concludes that Hitler is promoting only man’s oblivion of
being and entanglement in beings—an obsession with domination in the
name of “ideas” that alienate us from our true essence (GA 66, 123).
But any reader who hopes to see Heidegger draw closer to liberal
or leftist points of view will be disappointed. All political systems demand
a blind “faith in faith” (GA 67, 115). All ideology is a thoughtless vulgarization
of the metaphysics of ideas that must ultimately be blamed on Plato’s idea tou
agathou (GA 67, 40–41)—and perhaps, in the case of liberalism and communism,
on “Judeo-Christian domination” (GA 66, 39). He looks upon
democratic idealism and “cultural optimism” with contempt (GA 66, 39–40),
seeing the “‘common sense’ [Heidegger uses the English words] of the democracies”
as essentially identical to “the rational conformity to plan of ‘total
authority’” (GA 66, 234).